Blog
Volvo Blows Jag-You-Are Totally Out of the Water
This is utterly ludicrous. Volvo just launched this four minute commercial on YouTube and it is everything that the Jaguar commercial is NOT. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQX-QXxwGvA The comments show all the difference in the world. People are saying that they hadn't considered a Volvo before but are now. This is the whole point of an advertisement. Volvo's marketing department has pantsed Jag's, knocked them on all fours, and then rode them around like a pig laughing hysterically at Jaguar's stupidity.
The Dark Herald’s Game of the Year
I step out of the ruins of a record shop and onto the streets of Selaco. My health is 100% and I have plenty of ammo. Like a perfect nugget I’m admiring the scenery instead of checking the corner I’m about to step into. My reward for this stupidity was a flash and a boom heralding the loss of half my health. I chuck an ice grenade at the pair of SOBs while I slide out of their line of fire...
Hasbro Comes to Bury Gygax, Not to Praise Him
Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast are in the process of releasing their DEI drenched new rules for Dungeons and Dragons. As a kind of cross promotion they are releasing a companion book the 40th Anniversary Making of DnD. The forward of which absolutely castigates Gary Gygax for the unspeakable crime of not being a 21st-century Woketard. In celebration of this literary masterpiece, I'll be hosting a special game this weekend. Discuss on Social Galactic
RE:View – The Muppet Christmas Carol
No story on Earth has been done to death as thoroughly as Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. Every possible iteration on this classic story has been made. I tried to find out how many versions there were by typing “A Christmas Carol” into the IMDB search bar, and it called me an asshole. Or it may as well have. I stopped counting the screen adaptions when I hit the fifth search page of results. A Nashville Christmas Carol, A Country Christmas Carol, Dora’s Christmas...
Jaguar For MODERN AUDIENCES
Pictured: A Jaguar NOT for modern audiences. Jaguar, the legendary British auto manufacturer, not the South American bobcat, started life as the Swallow Sidecar company. They made, admittedly, handsome motorcycle sidecars. They expanded to become the Swallow Coachbuilding Company. Back in the 1920s, the British favored a model where the car's chassis, engine, brakes, and engineering guts in general would be built at one company and then taken to a coachbuilder who would fashion a bespoke body for the...
Star Trek’s Tombstone
It's called Unification And it feels like a respectful sendoff to something that was once beloved by many. Like the kind of goodbye to the 23rd Century the old Trekkies wanted. The franchise is dead. Kurtzman Trek is a skinsuit zombie version of something that simply can't be brought back to life by today's Hollywood. There is no one left at this point that can do it and Alex Kurtzman is good enough at Hollywood power games that there are too many...
First Impressions: Dune Prophecy
Have you ever wanted to see what a Merchant Ivory space opera would look like? Well, now you can! Okay, there’s more to it than that, but if you are a dude just be prepared, that’s all I’m saying. Dune: Prophecy started life as Dune: The Sisterhood and has been in development since before the plague. It may well have benefited from spending a little too much time in the bottle. It began development during a regime at Warner that was doing its...
Half-Life 2 At Twenty
An upgraded version of Half-Life 2 has been made available to... I was going to say celebrate the twentieth anniversary but perhaps observe is a better term. In any case, you can't beat the price, which is free. The reason I say observe instead of celebrate is that at the end of day, the Half-Life series is up there with A Song of Ice and Fire, as a sprawling saga that will never be finished. As a story, it is literally...
They Have No One But Rey
“Rey is the most valuable cinematic asset, In some ways the only one.” That is a quote from an alleged LucasFilm insider that the Hollywood Reporter talked to. What is unbelievably tragic is that he is perfectly right. LucasFilm at this point has nothing else. A lot of this comes down to Disney’s institutional commitments and incredibly passive-aggressive corporate culture. At Disney, even the mildest of constructive criticisms feels like a vicious attack because at Disney, it is. And if you are foolish or...
The Dark Recommends: The Penguin
**There will be spoilers throughout** The Batman has its fans and I will grant it has a few things going for it. The main plot was decent enough. The muscle car Batmobile was at least a little different. Alfred was good. However, DEI was force-fed into it by the Warner comedy team of Sarnoff and Hamada. Catwoman lecturing Bruce Wayne on his White Male Privilege was stomach-churning. The Gotham City being flooded was a violent tonal shift, it hadn’t been...
The New Disney CEO Will Be Worse?
Disney Chairman of the Board James Gorman's search committee apparently has orders from Bob Iger. "Find someone who will make the bastards miss me!" The internal Candidates at Disney haven't been all that promising. Jason Pitaro the Chairman of ESPN has done fine with his division but he doesn't have the connections he'd need to reestablish the broken key talent links in the entertainment industry, nor does he have experience dealing with the ridiculous egos and power trips of show business....
The Captain of the Kotaku Concordia Has Fled the Ship
Editor of Kotaku and failed sex worker Alyssa Mercante has left Kotaku, right before it got hit by a massive round of layoffs. I don't like being fair to Mercante but I feel I need to be both to maintain my own standards for integrity and because she is incredibly litigious. She did not put Kotaku in the position it's in today. There was a string of terrible decisions that have been made starting with the shitcanning of Brian Crecente...
Tony Todd RIP
"My beloved. May you rest in power sweet to the sweet in heaven," said Virginia Madsen, Todd's Candyman costar in a tearful post on Instagram. "The great actor Tony Todd has left us and now is an angel. As he was in life." Tony Todd was born in 1954 in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Hartford, Conn. He studied at the Eugene O'Neill National Theater Institute in Waterford, Conn., and Trinity Rep Conservatory in Providence, R.I. The six foot five...
Why Was the Polling So Bad?
Democrats are absolutely beside themselves with rage over... Well everything at the moment but they feel they have once again been betrayed by the polling. This time they are completely right. A while back, Disney subsidiary ESPN bought up Nate Silver's 538 to help with their forecasting. It was actually a pretty smart idea. Then 538 gets transferred over to ABC News, which takes it away from Jason Pitaro and puts it under the control of... You guessed it! Dana Walden. Nate Silver...
Why Disney is the Biggest Loser of the Election
If not the biggest certainly the most high profile is The Walt Disney Company. Under Bob Iger's leadership, Disney has become the company that always and ever only ever only puts its money on one side of the table. Not a great idea for a high-profile business. Hollywood used to be smarter about it. The Moguls would back Republicans and the talent would back Democrats. It gave Tinsel Town a foot in each camp. Now it's only one side but since everyone...
Blogs and Ends: The Powell Group Update
I return to you now at the turn of the tide. I'll just be updating this post over the next couple of days as I suspect there is going to be minimal interest in a comics and pop culture blog before Wednesday. Just check in now and then. FIRST Oh, dear. It appears that as friends go the Powell Group is definitely of the fair-weather variety. Powell has deleted any and all references to Sweet Baby Inc. from their website and...
It Was Wiccan All Along?
Apparently so. I can’t really do a proper review of Agatha All Along because I didn’t watch the whole thing. Having learned more than I ever wanted to about Marvel TV’s storytelling I figured, (rightfully so as it turned out) that I could just skip everything between the premiere episode and the series finale because any and all in the middle would be utterly pointless filler. I was right by the way but it does mean I can not in all...
Sweet Baby Inc. Is Doing Just Fine
“Bowser is Bondage Daddy Sexy!” -Kim Belair: CEO and Co-founder of Sweet Baby Inc. That quote is from Kim Belair’s long-defunct (and as of today mostly erased) podcast, The Sexiest Podcast. It was one of several podcasts Belair was doing at the time. She was clearly throwing content at the wall to see what would stick. Sexiest Podcast completely failed to live up to its name. It was a podcast where Kim Belair and a friend discussed various things they wanted to have...
Emergency Announcement
https://twitter.com/Godzilla_Toho/status/1852356885871251798 I could use more announcements like this.
Analog Horror
Paraphrase Conversation Truncation Eldest Darkspawn: No, Dad they're being smart. Dark Herald: Putting Alien: Romulus out on something as completely obsolete as VHS is smart? Eldest Darkspawn: Analog Horror! You know, it's like analog energy. It's like giving horror. It slaps! Dark Herald: How does it... uh... slap? Eldest Dark: VHS is like our Gen Z thing. Dark Herald: I'm kind of sure it was a Gen X thing. I was there, at Blockbuster, most every Friday night. Eldest Dark Spawn: That is so...
Vampire Rules: (Part III) Netflix Woke Dracula
Back in Doctor Who's heyday, the weekly numbers in Britain and America were huge. Big enough to lift BBC America into Tier 1 cable status, Tennant had emo girls throwing their panties at the TV, and the best episode of the year, the one everyone looked forward to, was the one that would be written by Steven Moffat. When Russel Davies decided that five years was enough, fans were worried about who was going to run the series. And then they...
Teri Garr RIP
She was on the set of It Takes a Thief when she got the bad news. Her backdoor pilot hadn’t been picked up. It wasn’t really a surprise. Laugh-in always buried that show in the ratings. It would have been her big break but, ah well, that’s show biz, she thought to herself. Teri Garr had no way to know that Star Trek had delivered her big break after all. Sad but expected bad news. The final curtain has fallen on...
Hardriveby: Faith – The Unholy Trinity
We are currently living in a golden age of indie horror games. The last five years have seen an explosion in a genre that used to get one game a year back in the 1990s and one every three years during the double Os. Those AAA titles were good games, certainly better than what we get now from major studios but good horror? Well... Not so much really. They all had their moments to be sure. Clive Barker’s Undying was...
RE:Play Clive Barker’s Undying
"[Undying]'s a dark fantasy with lots of levels, lots of realities in it. It's not horror in the sense of Hellraiser. It's horror which is very bloody, very graphic, with plenty of monsters, no question; but also a big adventure level in it. There is the sense, as you are visiting different dimensions and alien cities, that a monster in an alien city is a different thing than a monster sitting in your kitchen sink!” – Clive Barker Clive Barker started...
The Dark Herald Recommends: Venom 3 – The Last Dance
Well, it is the best of the Venom movies. I do have to give it that. Even if that is about the same as being the finest hockey player in Zimbabwe. It did have a few things going for it that the others didn’t. I can actually remember what happened during this movie. That’s new for Venom. Due to some arcane filmmaking technique known only to Sony Marvel. The previous Venom films stubbornly refuse to move from short-term memory register to...
RE:Play Phantasmagoria
“The history of horror is basically a history of what we aren’t all that frightened of anymore. Horror began appropriately enough in France shortly after the Reign of the Terror. Religion was officially outlawed. The Catholic Church had been forced out of the country and if you were going to worship anything at all, it had to be the Goddess of Reason. Graveyards were filled with dead people who were according to the First Republic, gone forever. They were in an...
Vampire Rules: Nosferatu
I know it's Kinski. Shut up about it. Nosferatu: Derivation from the Slavic Nesuferitu; defined as insufferable One Greek word: Nosphoros - disease-bearing The etymology indicates a common Indo-European root word. Possibly pre-historic in origin Something that was whispered in hushed tones around Pleistocene campfires. Nosferatu is the oldest surviving movie based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. There may or may not have been a Russian Dracula film made in 1920, although it’s possible that that movie only got as far as an announcement. No known...
It Came From the 80s – A Random Horror Listicle (Part 2)
Fright Night (1985) We are now into much better-known territory. At least for the first one. The Plot: horror movie geek Charlie Brewster, thinks that a real-life vampire has moved in next door to him. Everyone thinks he's nuts, including the has-been Hammer-Horror actor turned Monster-Chiller-Horror-Theater UHF TV host, Peter Vincent (the perfect name by the way). Peter Vincent is hired by Charlie to hunt the Vampire Next Door. Peter thinks it will be much easier just to prove that Jerry...
It Came From the Eighties – A Random Horror Listicle (Part 1)
REPOST: 5 October 2023. I like to repost this one, every year in the lonesome October. Ah, Horror. The "lesser genre". Eternally demeaned, abused, and snubbed by the elders of the film industry. Yet almost all of the major filmmakers started out in it. The only genre that has produced more mainstream directors is no-shit porn and I am not kidding about that. Rather than do some best-of-all-time horror movies list I will just concentrate on the 1980s. The Eighties represent a unique...
Hammer Films: The Decline
The memory of Ralph Bates is in an unfortunate position. The son of two Psychiatrists he had a unique approach to the craft of drama being able to concentrate on the deeper drives of characters and more importantly those of the characters he was playing against. He had enough raw talent to land a scholarship to the Yale Drama School. When he returned to Britain he went into the more or less standardized path of an apprentice British actor, touring small...
Dune: Prophesy – Final Trailer
TV shows don't usually take four years to launch. It started life as Dune: The Sisterhood. The series is based on one of the prequel books by Brian Herbert and Keven Anderson that I've never read. It was part of their trilogy on the founding of the Great Schools, (the Suk, Mentat, and of course Bene Gesserit schools) after the Butlerian Jihad. It's been in pre-production so long that quite a few members of the original cast...
Disney Announces New Chairman of the BOD
He's the Executive Chairman of the BOD of Morgan Stanley and frankly was nowhere on my radar for this job. This announcement was made with a concurrent declaration that Disney would be announcing the new CEO in early 2026. Meaning the Dark Herald was wrong, but will plead extenuating circumstances. I had predicted that Walden would be named President and COO of the Walt Disney Company by the end of this year. Effectively making her the crown princess. That...